Soon they’ll carry little smartphones around. I hope.
Contagious scratching may be hardwired into the brain
Sometimes you just gotta scratch, man.
Scientists discover ‘hunting circuits’ that can turn fuzzy rats into fuzzy murderous rats
It’s pretty scary that they can do it to be honest.
Are elephants really frightened by mice?
Look out, Dumbo!
When mice ‘sing’ they produce ultrasounds we’ve only seen in jet engines
Until recently it wasn’t clear how mice were able to ‘sing’ their high-pitched tunes.
Scientists may have witnessed how memories form in real time — a first
A new study offers insight into how neurons work together to make us remember stuff.
Light stimulation can help recover Alzheimer’s memories
Recovering memories lost after Alzheimer’s can be as simple as flipping a switch – at least for mice. According to a new research, these memories aren’t lost, it’s just the retrieval of the retrieval mechanism that is impaired. Loss of long-term memory and some learned experiences is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s diseases. Despite the disease affecting millions of people, we still don’t fully
Physically active mice are better at fighting cancer
Here’s one more benefit of exercise (as if we needed more): it can help you fight cancer.
Wireless implants can block or induce the sensation of pain
Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed implantable devices that can activate — and in theory, block too — pain signals traveling from the body through the spinal cord before they reach the brain.
Asthma drug reverses aging in the brain of mice
Science and medicine advances have stretched the life span further than ever. That’s good news, but the quality of life is also important. People live longer now than ever, but they also live longer in sickness and suffering of both body and mind. Concerning the latter, a clear, sharp mind can be a rare thing once you pass a venerable age, but a team at the Paracelsus Medical University in Austria may be on to something. Working with mice, the researchers gave some of the elderly rodents a common drug called Montelukast that’s used to treat asthma in children. To everyone surprise, the old rats started growing new brain cells and performed almost as well as the young in cognitive tests. If only the drug worked on people, too – we might find out soon.
Mice live longer after receiving probiotic supplement
Chronic inflammation of the colon has been recognized as a leading factor contributing to senescence and age-related diseases. Previously, scientists identified polyamines (PAs) levels, which are aliphatic low- molecular compounds, as being linked with systemic inflammation. The more PAs you have, the healthier your gut. But as we age, PAs levels fall and intestinal barrier dysfunction may occur. To test how significant is this contribution, researchers from Japan fed mice with probiotic supplements than compared them to a control. They found the mice lived longer, suggesting “ingestion of specific probiotics may be an easy approach for improving intestinal health and increasing lifespan.”
Mice in space grow thinner skin and more hair, but how safe is micro-g for humans?
Six mice were spent 91 days on board the Internationals Space Station in 2009, or seven years in the life of a mouse. Comparing their tissue characteristics with mice living in the same conditions, only on Earth, researchers found micro-gravity induces some peculiar biological changes. For instance, the mice’s skin was thinner and their hair grew more. Like humans, mice too suffer from muscle and bone atrophy in micro-gravity, which prompted scientists to consider them as reliable models for studying the effect of living in space for extended periods of time. Previously, human astronauts have complained about skin dryness and irritation and these latest findings seems to suggest that these may indeed be caused by micro-gravity.
Bacteria is also hereditary, from mother to child, just like DNA
We know that things like eye or skin colour are encoded in our DNA and passed down by our parents, but many other traits are significantly influenced by another hereditary mechanism: bacterial offspring. A paper in Nature suggests microbes are passed down from mother mice to pups, passing down traits similarly to how genes influence illness and health.
Mice with multiple sclerosis walk and run again after human stem cell treatment
In a feat that surprised even the scientists who made the experiment, mice disabled by a condition similar to multiple sclerosis (MS) began to walk and even run again after human stem cells had been transplanted. The findings could potentially offer new means of treating MS, a terribly disease which plagues some 2.3 million people worldwide. Growing stem cells and new legs University
Sirtuin supplement diet prolongs life in mice
A wonder pill that prolongs life and cuts the risks of developing deadly diseases. Scientists have been looking for such a drug for a long time. Research in this direction shows that enhancing the expression of a certain gene called SIRT1 (sirtuin 1) may fare good results in this respect. Recently, researchers at the National Institute on Aging at the National
Promiscuous female mice breed sexier male offspring. Research may help conservation efforts
University of Utah researchers found that female mice that live in a competitive social environment and choose to mate casually with multiple partners give birth to males who are much more attractive to female mice, at the cost of a dramatic cut in life expectancy however. You only have one life, says the sexy male mouse. The research is a
Schizophrenia symptoms canceled in mice after gene therapy
A group of international researchers may have reached a breakthrough moment after they successfully eliminated schizophrenia symptoms in mice after they targeted a specific gene and manipulated its expression. Their findings offer hope that similar results might be possible for humans as well. Despite schizophrenia being well documented for many years now and it being a somewhat prevailing mental disorder, schizophrenia
Scientists engineer ‘super mice’
Scientists from the École Polytenchnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), with the aid of colleagues from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of Lausanne, managed to improve the muscle constitution of mice by knocking out genetically a “co-repressor” of the DNA transcription process. The end product are mice that are faster, stronger and healthier – meet the new generation
Scientists grow new teeth from stem cells
A recently published remarkable study describes how scientists from Japan have successfully manage to grow teeth inside a lab using mice stem cells. Takashi Tsuji from Tokyo University of Science and his team managed to achieve this after extracting stem cells from the molars of mice. They then transported these cells to the lab where they eventually used them to
Pollution linked to memory loss
It’s pretty evident for anyone living in a big, crowded city what pollution looks like and to what degree our health is affected by it. Besides things like your lungs or skin, scientists relate in a new study published in Molecular Psychiatry, how they believe pollution can cause memory loss. To prove their point, they confined a group of lab